Salish

Salish is an original typeface inspired by the art of the Pacific Northwest and specifically a shape called the ‘Ovoid’ which is based on the shape of a resting salmon egg. While intended for display, Salish works surprisingly well in text setting as well.

Salish comes in five weights and supports over 200 languages including those of the indigenous Pacific Northwest Salishan language group as well as Bella Coola and Haida.

Aetna

The Hamilton Wood Type Museum partnered with New York-basedP22 to set up a new type foundry, proceeds from which would directly benefit the museum. I was thrilled to volunteer my time toward a revival of the typeface ‘Aetna’.

Originally designed by the William H. Page & Co. Foundry in the 1820s, Aetna has the classic quirks and character of 19th century woodtype. I particularly like the numbers, and the ‘7’ always looks quite happy!

In addition to standard letterforms, Aetna also includes a fancy banner options for headline setting.

Selawik

Selawik is an OpenSource, metrics-compatible, Segoe UI replacement font available on GitHub.

Segoe UI is Microsoft’s core UI and branding typeface. Given the importance of this typeface, Microsoft wants to keep tight control over its use. However, increasingly there were situations where an app developer created a cross-platform app, or an OpenSource app, and wanted to use Segoe UI across all of them. Microsoft did not want to permit use of the font in these scenairos, but needed to provide a solution for these use cases—thus Selawik was born.

The major challenge of this project was to design a typeface that matched the metrics, style, and feel of Segoe UI while being sufficiently different.

Halo Wars 2

For the upcoming Halo Wars 2 game, 343 Industries and Creative Assembly asked me to produce a new typeface that would be used for in-game UI.

For this new typeface, they wanted a design that emphasized clarity and readability, while feeling strongly integrated into the Halo universe. Some of the key words were “clear, efficient, geometric, modern, futuristic, militaristic”.

The new Halo Wars 2 font supports five weights and Western European language support.

Image from the beta – font under development

Image from the beta – font under development

Sea of Thieves

Windlass is an existing font licensed by Rare to use in their upcoming Sea of Thieves game. They asked me to help them extend and update the typeface for their needs.

As part of my work, I extended the character set to meet their requirements, completely respaced the typeface to achieve an even color, added OpenType substitutions to reduce bad collisions, and updated the design of particular problematic characters.

One of the interesting challenges in extending the character set, was to ensure that the new diacritics and other elements fit into the design of the existing letters.